Welcome to the 11th edition of the Garden Life link up on No Ordinary Homestead.

I know a lot of people are just focusing on harvesting whatever they can from their gardens now, and we are doing quite a bit of that ourselves. This weekend, I’ve got to can all the jalapenos we have gathered recently. Thankfully that shouldn’t be too big of a deal since I’m just going to preserve them in vinegar. But we’ve got a few pounds worth at the moment, and even more on the plants still — and the last thing I want to do is end up wasting them all.

Speaking of harvesting, I just picked a bunch more tomatoes today and we have a couple of pounds worth…but I don’t think we’ll be doing much more than just eating them

We’ve still got quite a few tomatoes on the vine as well, but the few eggplants that were just starting don’t seem like they’re going to turn out, which isn’t such a huge surprise since eggplants really prefer warm weather.

A few people have asked about the variations of our tomatoes and I was finally able to find the tags below the plants describing the varieties. The bigger pear-shaped beefsteak variety is called Liguria, and they are from the Liguria region of Italy. We ate part of one of them last night on our burgers and it was very tasty. (You can see one of the bigger ones from the plant laying in the basket above)

One of the other varieties we have are oxheart tomatoes which we haven’t gotten to try yet — but soon. All of our tomato plants this year are from store-bought seedlings so I doubt they are heirloom varieties…but they at least do not have hybrid tags on them which means I will likely try to save some seeds from them for next year. The yellow ones have been very tasty although rather quick to spoil once they are ripe.

Now that I finally have the salad table closed most of the day, the lettuce is starting to take off again too, especially the mustard greens and other Asian varieties. We’ve been hitting temps down to about 45 at night/early morning and then up in the 70’s  during the day so it’s been interesting. I think I may have to get one of the little cold frame boxes we bought a few years ago for growing lettuce in our garden and put it over the aquaponics table where I have the lamb’s lettuce because it’s growing very slowly at this point. Need to throw some spinach seed out somewhere, too, which is another great cool weather crop.

In other garden news, our carrot seedlings are up all over the place and slowly coming along. It’s going to be interesting to see how far they get before the first frost– or before Mackenzie insists on pulling them up. She’s already eaten all the ones we planted over the summer, so that is clearly something we need to plant a whole lot more of next year. And onions! Our onions have so much flavor and were so good — and they are insanely easy to grow. Basically just plant the starter bulbs and forget about them!

The Brussel sprouts on the other hand are somehow not fairing so well. I’m not sure what it was, but something has eaten the leaves and only left the stems, so I’m doubtful that these plants will become anything. It was a gamble anyway. I would like to know what took off with them though…and what has been eating some of the lettuce leaves. Haven’t seen any bugs around and they are in two isolated areas, so I’m really not sure what is going on.

And we’ve got a few broccoli plants up as well so I’m rather happy about that too. Not that we eat a lot of broccoli (although I should definitely grow some cauliflower next year as I’ve discovered all sorts of new ways to eat it after our low carb diet adventure), but it’s good for you and I have a bunch of various broccoli seed varieties. Hopefully the broccoli won’t be dwarfed by the sage for too long. That’s the leaves from the transplant sage branch which is positively thriving now!

So that’s about it for our fall garden right now. Still things going on in the back garden that I’m thinking about and planning in. We’re looking into cover crops at the moment like alfalfa or buckwheat. So if you’ve got some experience with that, I’d love to hear about it!

Now I’m off to try my hand at making pumpkin puree and drying seeds…

I’d love to come visit your garden. Here’s how this works: 

PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!

1. You are free to join the Garden Life link up at any time. You can also skip a few weeks and then come back. It’s entirely up to you.
2. Please link directly to a post about your garden, a recipe, a tutorial for gardening, an inspirational idea, etc that relates to GARDENING — not your main blog URL.
3. Please only link to your own blog or photos hosted online.
4. Please link back to No Ordinary Homestead or a Garden Life link up post in your blog post. This way, if someone else wants to join the fun, they can. You can either link with text or using the Garden Life badge.
   Below is a code for the badge above – feel free to resize it as you need. Just copy and paste this code into your post or save and upload the image to your blog:
   <a href=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/garden-life-link-up/“><img title=”garden-life-300″ src=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/garden-life-300.gif” alt=”garden link up” width=”301″ height=”301″ /></a>
5. I highly encourage you to visit other participants and leave comments. This is a great way to meet new friends and become inspired about your garden! I try to visit all the blogs participating as well every week 🙂

That’s it! Share your garden with us by linking up below!

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